Cheat Sheet: Potential speech problem

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QUESTION: I am concerned about my daughter’s pronunciation of certain sounds. People outside our family occasionally have a difficult time understanding her. She just started kindergarten at a public school. What does a speech evaluation entail?

A: Before a speech evaluation, your child’s difficulties should go before a committee to determine if there is a need for an evaluation. This will include your input, in the form of a checklist that indicates the error sound(s) that are heard at home. If an evaluation is needed, you will be asked to complete a consent for testing and other information. Once the evaluation is complete, a meeting to review the results will be held. If your child meets guidelines, she will receive speech therapy. This is a short version of a detailed process.

A: You are a very wise mom for addressing this issue now. If your daughter does indeed have a speech problem, the earlier she gets speech therapy, the better she will do.

Speech therapy is offered through the public schools at no charge. Do not be worried about the speech evaluation, but do make sure that you get one. The speech evaluation is just a standard test that will have her say names of items, sentences, sounds, etc. They will mark which sounds she gets wrong and compare the test results with other kids her age.

It is important that you write a letter asking the school to evaluate her for a speech problem. Include in the letter problems that you are noting.

My son had a severe speech problem recognized at age 3 and he talks perfectly now. Unfortunately, he was not diagnosed with dyslexia until the 8th grade. I am telling you this not because you have to worry about it applying to you, but I wish someone would have told me so that I could have gotten my son reading help a lot sooner. It has taken me three school years to get reading help for my son. Common signs of dyslexia are:

May have difficulty pronouncing words.

May talk later than most children.

May have poor auditory memory for nursery rhymes.

May be unable to recall the right word.

May have trouble learning numbers, days of the week, color shapes and how to spell and write his name.

There is a list of many dyslexia signs in The Dyslexia Handbook at the Texas Education Agency Web page. All parents need to be aware of these signs. You cannot assume the school will recognize them, as my son had almost all the dyslexia signs and it took the school until 8th grade to recognize he was dyslexic. Get her help now and she will make progress.

Louise Baker, mother of two, including a teenage son with dyslexia

A: Children develop their articulation skills (correct pronunciation of individual sounds alone as well as in syllables, words and conversation) a little at a time. Certain sounds are expected to be developed at different ages, but some children do so a little earlier or later than their peers with no cause for concern. The latest sounds to develop are usually sounds involving “s”, “sh”, “z” and “r” and typically emerge between ages 6 and 8. Other sounds, such as “p”, “b”, “d” and “k,” are easily produced by most 3-year-olds. Determining if a child has a speech disorder requires comparing the child’s speech and language development to what is expected at the child’s age. The parent of a 6-year-old who says “wabbit” for “rabbit” or “paghetti” for “spaghetti” should not be concerned. However, according to the American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA), children should typically be understood by most people outside the family by the end of kindergarten.

The first thing a concerned parent should do is be certain that the child is not experiencing a loss of hearing. Chronic ear infections and even colds can often interfere with hearing and result in delayed speech and language development. Consulting with the family physician or pediatrician may result in a referral for a hearing evaluation. Parents also can check with their public school, as most routinely perform hearing screenings of kindergarten-age children as well as some other grades early in the school year.

A child’s teacher also is a great resource for parents who are concerned about their child’s speech. Experienced teachers usually can address these concerns by letting the parent know how well the child’s speech is understood by other children and adults in the classroom. Teachers also usually are quite knowledgeable about what is typical speech for a particular age or grade level. Classroom teachers also can assist parents in how to contact the school’s speech-language pathologist for further consultation about the need for an evaluation.

In conducting an evaluation, a speech-language pathologist will look at a child’s speech and language skills within the context of his or her total development and will most certainly begin with an evaluation of both hearing and vision ability. Along with observations of the child, the speech-language pathologist will use some standardized tests and scales of articulation, as well as information from the child’s classroom teacher and the parents. The speech-language pathologist also will assess the child’s language skills, both verbally (called expressive language) and nonverbally (called receptive language). Language skills include vocabulary, understanding word meanings and sentence structure, among other things. This may be done by formal testing or through informal means such as observation or screening tests. Another important part of this evaluation will be to assess the child’s oral-motor status (how a child’s mouth, tongue, palate, etc. work together for speech) as this often can be the cause of articulation problems.

The most important thing parents can do to encourage appropriate speech and language development is to engage the child in conversation as often as possible. This means speaking to the child in detail and listening attentively to the child when he/she speaks. Asking the child to repeat or clarify should be done in a casual, non-threatening manner. Putting too much pressure on the child to speak clearly can result in other problems.